Beneath the Lion's Gaze by Maaza Mengiste A Novel

"An important novel, rich in compassion for its anguished characters."—The New York Times Book Review

This memorable, heartbreaking story opens in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1974, on the eve of a revolution. Yonas kneels in his mother’s prayer room, pleading to his god for an end to the violence that has wracked his family and country. His father, Hailu, a prominent doctor, has been ordered to report to jail after helping a victim of state-sanctioned torture to die. And Dawit, Hailu’s youngest son, has joined an underground resistance movement—a choice that will lead to more upheaval and bloodshed across a ravaged Ethiopia.

Beneath the Lion’s Gaze tells a gripping story of family, of the bonds of love and friendship set in a time and place that has rarely been explored in fiction. It is a story about the lengths human beings will go in pursuit of freedom and the human price of a national revolution. Emotionally gripping, poetic, and indelibly tragic, Beneath The Lion’s Gaze is a transcendent and powerful debut.

Unrated Critic Reviews for Beneath the Lion's Gaze

Kirkus Reviews

Hailu treats patients without regard to political affiliations, but his neutrality is challenged when a torture victim is brought in by several soldiers from the military junta now in charge of Ethiopia.

The New York Times

Under the weight of this solitude, all of the emperor’s hours, minutes and seconds blurred and ran together like a slow, dying river.”
Once Selassie is killed — Mengiste imagines a military officer as the assassin — the novelist turns her attention to life under the Derg, the Marxist military con...

The Guardian

Of the many great traumas of 20th-century Ethiopia – invasion by Mussolini, war with Eritrea, with Sudan, with Somalia, famine after famine, two violent regime changes – arguably the greatest was the deposition of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, and the replacement of hundreds of years of imperia...

The Bookbag

Hailu continues to work in the hospital, trying to hold it together in the face of pressure to treat on the basis of rank rather than clinical need, trying to perform with ever decreasing stocks of medicine.

PopMatters

After the coup and the institution of the military dictatorship, these characters are pulled apart in a manner familiar to civil war stories, rebelling against the regime or supporting the government out of fear or greed.

Full Stop

For his terminally ill wife, “death came in moonlight,” but for this appallingly tortured woman, death “is in the crash and tear of depravity and brutality.” Deciding that such a death should only torment a person once, Hailu slips cyanide between his patient’s lips, holds her hand, and watches a...

Tadias

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Norton & Company
Product Description
An epic tale of a father and two sons, of betrayals and loyalties, of a family unraveling in the wake of Ethiopia’s revolution.This memorable, heartbreaking story opens in Addis Ababa,...